From Ubisoft To Gordon Brown: News Roundup July 28th

Ubisoft announces four separate game delays, devastating Ubisoft fans in today’s news roundup. In other news a sequel to The Darkness is confirmed, Bungie’s next IP is soon to receive a publisher, and Gordon Brown expresses his wish to take his time off by playing computer games!

Ubisoft Delay Four Games

Ubisoft released the results of how they performed in the first quarter saleswise, and things aren’t looking great. Sales are down 51% through the period April 1st 2009 to June 30th, when compared with their performance in the same period last year. This news was followed by the announcement of four game delays. Splinter Cell: Conviction and Red Steel 2 have both been pushed back to the fourth fiscal quarter (January 1st, 2010- March 31st, 2010), not making their third fiscal quarter target.

Ghost Recon 4 and I Am Alive have been given a broad release date of some point in 2010-2011, instead of the predicated early 2010 release. Ubisoft didn’t comment on the reason for these delays, but considering the weak sales in the first quarter its pretty likely Ubisoft wanted to make sure the games receive the praise and sales they need. [1UP]

The Darkness Sequel Confirmed

The Top Cow Productions panel at Comic Con has confirmed a sequel to 2007 shooter The Darkness is in the works. The first game was pretty good, perhaps not living up to its potential, something which hopefully the sequel can achieve.

Following this announcement original developers Starbreeze have confirmed they won’t be involved this time around. Starbreeze CEO Johan Kristiansson said “I heard that there were talks about a Darkness sequel, but Starbreeze is not involved in anything like that right now. We are busy on two projects together with EA”. [VG247]

Bungie’s New IP Gathering Interest

Bungie are moving away from Halo, and developing a new IP, gathering a lot of interest in the process. A new publisher may soon be announced with designer Lars Bakken saying “I think internally we'll know sometime soon. I don't handle these things, but I'd imagine we're going to know way before we make the public announcement of who's handling that!”

No news or details has been revealed on the title , but Bethesda production director Ashley Chang comments on how desirable, and therefore expensive, the new IP will be. “You can count on one hand the number of publisher's around who can afford to publish Bungie's next game: EA (via EA Partners), Activision, Ubisoft, Microsoft, and of course, Bethesda” said Cheng on his personal blog. He even speculated on the possibility of Sony being a potential bidder, but considers this unlikely. [EuroGamer]

Prime Minister Gets His Game On

The Prime Minister of the UK, Gordon Brown, has revealed his wish to play more computer games in his down time. The Daily Mirror reported in an interview with the man himself what his plans are for Parliament’s summer recess; “he plans to do more "re-winning" of [his childrens'] interest as he watches the boys' favourite TV shows and plays computer games over the next few weeks at the couple's home in Scotland and on their holiday”. Hopefully Brown will be busting out the Amiga and showing his kids how it’s done, or maybe he’s more of a modern man and prefers to spend his time on Call of Duty, who knows? See you online Brown! [Kotaku]